Daniel slammed the spade into the concrete. “You’re not asking the right questions. You want to know why and how, and you’re getting strangled by it! Listen to what Dad’s saying. Don’t sell the house. What do you think he means? He means this. The garage floors. It wasn’t me. I came in one day after, and they were just done.”

“That doesn’t mean it was him. It doesn’t mean he did it,” I said, storming out of the garage.

I slammed the door on them, the thunder directly overhead, muffling the sound of the jackhammer. Daniel had emptied the garage, and all the material sat behind it, out in the rain. The gardening supplies, the tools, the wheelbarrow.

I grabbed the wheelbarrow and pushed it back to the door, silently cursing them, and myself, and my dad, and Corinne for disappearing in the first place. Tyler and Daniel paused to stare at me when I threw open the door again. I started picking up chunks of concrete, hauling them into the wheelbarrow. “Well? What should I do with this?” I had my hands on my hips, trying to focus on the task. Just the task.

Tyler met my eyes. “Back of my truck,” he said.

I wheeled it out into the rain, lifted the tarp, and hauled the pieces underneath, my hands turning chalky, like Daniel’s. When I turned back for the garage, Tyler was standing a few feet away, watching me. “You should go to Dan’s place,” he said. The rain fell from his hair, soaked his clothes, came down in a torrent between us.

“Did he send you out here to tell me that?”

He stepped closer, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face in the dark, in the rain. “Yeah, he did.” Another step. “Look, it might be nothing.”

“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be here.”

He came closer, put a hand on the truck behind me. Dropped his head, letting out a breath I could feel on my forehead, resting his own against mine for a second. “I’m here because you called me. It’s as simple as that.” And then his lips were sliding over mine in the rain, my back against his truck, and my fingers were in his hair, pulling him impossibly, desperately closer, until the jackhammer started up once more. “I’m sorry,” he said, pushing himself away. “I wish we could go back.”

My hands were shaking. Everything about me was shaking, and the rain was coming down harder.

“You really should go,” he said, striding back to the garage with his head tucked down.

I should’ve listened. I wanted to. I wanted nothing more.

But it wasn’t fair to them or Corinne. I had to bear witness. I had to pay my debts.

* * *

THE NEXT FEW HOURS consisted of Daniel and Tyler dislodging fragments of the floor and me moving the pieces in a wheelbarrow to Tyler’s truck, all of us covered with white powder.

None of us spoke. None of us came close to touching each other again.

The floor was in pieces, and Tyler stood back, hands on his hips, breathing heavily with exertion. The earth was exposed and waiting. Tyler got a shovel from his truck, Daniel used the one in the corner, and I used the garden spade from out back, softening the earth until it crumbled, coming up in chunks.

The only sounds were our breathing, shovels hitting earth, dirt hitting dirt, and rain and thunder.

And from deep in my memory, Corinne’s words in my ear, the scent of spearmint, her cold fingers, and my skin rising in goose bumps as I dug in once more, hitting something that was not earth, not rock.

My fingers reached in, touched plastic, and I jerked back. Used my shaking hands to brush aside some dirt. It was a blue tarp, like the one Tyler had in the back of his truck at this very moment.

Of course it was me.

It was me with the tiny shovel and the corner of the garage.

It was me, and it was fitting—that I should be the one to find her.

I stood too quickly, my vision swirling as I pressed myself against the wall. Tyler and Daniel had stopped, moved to see what I had uncovered. Stood around the spot I’d left. Daniel used the side of the shovel to brush more dirt off the tarp, to nudge it a bit to the side, exposing a corner of quilt.

Daniel sucked in a quick breath. “Oh, fuck.”

Blue material and yellow stitching.

My mother’s blanket that she wore around her legs in her wheelchair. Long, dull hair, matted and spilling out the top.

Like whoever had put her here, in the earth, couldn’t bear the thought of her being cold.

* * *

MY MOTHER DIDN’T DIE in this house. She intended to, but I guess at one point she also intended to live. Intention is nice, but it’s a thing sometimes based more on hope than on reality.

It had been winter, and with winter comes the common cold, and we all had it. My father came down with it first, which wasn’t something I’d typically remember; Daniel and I had the chicken pox together, and I remembered my mother dunking us into oatmeal baths, dousing us with calamine, but I couldn’t remember which of us got it first. This cold, I remember: Dad’s dry cough echoing at night, and the hospital mask we attached over our mom’s ears, and him sleeping on the couch. And then Daniel coming down with it, and then me, and then her.

The cold quickly running its course through all of us but becoming pneumonia for her. Packing her up to the hospital, the onslaught of fluid in her lungs and ineffectual IV treatments, and her sudden death.

She was terminal—had been terminal—and yet her death was unexpected. Caught us all unprepared. I guess I imagined last words of wisdom from my mother, something meaningful to hold on to, something worthy of a story to tell my children. Something with weight that would belong to me alone.

I felt robbed.

It was my dad’s fault. Even he knew it. I suppose if I’m being honest with myself, I know that it was a virus’s fault and cancer’s before that. And she could’ve caught it from any of us. But if my dad traced back the threads—which of course he had, as he was the type of person to follow every thread no matter what rabbit hole it led him down—it would end with him.

Maybe he knew where it came from, that virus. A student at school, a colleague from the workroom. The man behind the counter of the coffee shop, or the woman who asked for directions. Maybe he had his own point of blame. Maybe he saw this person with his girlfriend, or laughing next to his car, or staring out the window absently, and thought: You killed my wife. And they never knew. How many people out there are responsible for some tragedy and don’t even know it?

* * *

THIS WAS WHAT I was thinking about when I saw the quilt. This was what I did to protect myself for just one more moment. Focusing on my anger, on my mother, on who was to blame—the fault, and the suddenness, and maybe even its bitter insignificance—and not on what lay underneath the blanket.